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The free newsletter unpacks important and thought-provoking news stories every month, and helps you to think about them critically. Subscribe here.

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Download a HUGE amount of free lessons, newsletters, TED talks docs, assessment guidance, and other goodies on this page.

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You can use the stories to develop a clearer understanding of this element of TOK, see how TOK concepts manifest in the real world, and gather examples to support arguments in the essay and exhibition.

We've arranged these stories in a way that relates to our 5 Big Question framework for TOK, which is our favoured way of structuring the course. There are other ways to structure TOK, such as the Classic structure.

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An FT review of a new history book, On Savage Shores, which challenges the narrative of Columbus discovering the Americas.  

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An FT review of a new history book, On Savage Shores, which challenges the narrative of Columbus discovering the Americas.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Begin by asking students what happened in 1492. You may need to remind them of the rhyme to help them remember this; otherwise, prompt them by perhaps referring to Columbus, and the European ‘voyages of discovery’. Then ask them to read through the article. What is the focus of Caroline Dodds Pennock’s new book (On Savage Shores), and how does it reframe this period of history? Why does the article argue that “our choice of words matters”? Why do you think history has traditionally focused on the experiences of the Europeans, rather than those of the indigenous peoples? What are the challenges of writing the history of marginalised people? Overall, from which perspective should history be written?

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

KEY TERMS Discover, Conquest vs. unsanctioned invasion, Historical framing, Marginalised, Uncertain, Speculation

LINKS TO History, Indigenous societies, Language

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This courageous account puts the indigenous Americans who came to Europe, most as slaves, at the centre of the story

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A Guardian article, looking at how an online history centre is trying to overcome political division over the Spanish Civil War. 

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A Guardian article, looking at how an online history centre is trying to overcome political division over the Spanish Civil War. 

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UNPACKING THE ARTICLE What is the Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War? (students can follow the link to see it for themselves) How is it seeking to ‘dispel the clouds of politics’ around events from the past (in this case, the Spanish Civil War)? Why is it important to recognize the complexities of the past, rather than apply ‘partisan attitudes’ and ‘binary analyses’? Overall, what is the difference between memory and history, and why is it vital to grasp this in order to understand the past?

KEY TERMS Consensus, Rewrite history, Partisan attitudes, Islands of memory, Polarisation, Historical memory

LINKS TO History, Politics

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In the middle of September, three weeks before Spain's senate approved a landmark law to honour the victims of the Spanish civil war and the subsequent Franco dictatorship, a new museum quietly threw open its digital doors.

The Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War, an online history centre that has been almost a decade in the making, may chronicle and examine a conflict that ended 83 years ago but its aims could not be more timely.

As last Wednesday's senate session demonstrated, there is still precious little consensus over the 1936-39 war and how to deal with its bitter legacy.

Spain's socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the new law would strengthen the country's democracy and help bring "justice, reparation and dignity" to the victims of the war and the Franco regime.

His opponents begged to differ. A senator for the conservative People's party accused the government of trying to "rewrite history" and of "dynamiting" 40 years of forgiveness and reconciliation. The far-right Vox, meanwhile, said it was a "despicable and wretched attack" on Spain's recent history.

Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, one of the architects of the virtual museum, says that while there is a wealth of excellent historical research and material on the war, much of it has not been properly transmitted to the general public. Old enmities, decades of silence, and cursory approaches to teaching schoolchildren about the war and its aftermath mean partisan attitudes, binary analyses and political distortions continue to this day.

"When we started this project, we had to figure out many things, such as what the situation was of the public history of the Spanish civil war in Spain," says Cazorla-Sánchez, a professor of history at Trent university in Canada.

"We came up with the idea that in Spain we have islands of memory in public history. We wanted to connect them and to create a continent of knowledge. We wanted to create tools that would enable us to convey the history of Spain and the memory of Spanish history to wide sectors of the population."

The online centre, which bills itself as the "first museum dedicated to this central event of 20th-century history", tackles topics that were long taboo under Franco and which remain problematic for many today.

Three years after Franco's remains were finally removed from their mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen, Spain now has a democratic memory law that will see the creation of a census and a national DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains of the tens of thousands of people who still lie in unmarked graves, and a ban on groups that glorify the Franco regime.

Although the socialists and their far-left coalition partners see the law as a necessary attempt to come to terms with the past, the Spanish right views it as an affront to the 1977 amnesty law and the so-called Pact of Forgetting that helped steer the country back to democracy after Franco's death in 1975.

Faced with such polarisation, says Cazorla-Sánchez, there is an acute need for "an inclusive, democratic discourse" about what really happened in the war, about the atrocities committed by both sides, and about what happened afterwards.

"The Francoists kidnapped the pain of the Spaniards," he says. "They kidnapped history for their own purposes and they built a discourse that was Manichaean, criminal and hypocritical. We have to get those victims incorporated into our current identity from a humanistic and democratic perspective."

Cazorla-Sánchez and Adrian Shubert, the project's co-creator, are also uncomfortable with the way that memory is now often used as a synonym for history.

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"They are very different things and to really appreciate and understand historical memory, one has to have a reasonably good understanding of the history of what actually happened and how what happened has been presented publicly, and privately, over time and the way those things have changed," says Shubert, a history professor at Canada's York university.

The concept of memory, adds Cazorla-Sánchez, can often be a stumbling block to necessary debates: "The moment you put the word 'memory' in a text, half the Spanish population goes the other way because it's all about 'the Reds' and 'revenge'. I think we have to open new mental horizons when it comes to how we approach difficult history."

The team behind the museum is meeting later this month to discuss the next phase of the project. Plans include teaching tools for schools and universities, a linking of existing databases and resources, and a callout to people in Spain to create an "open gallery" of objects and documents relating to the war.

"One of the ways of dispelling these clouds of politics around the civil war is hearing ordinary Spaniards - not academics, not politicians - just talking about what it means to them," says Shubert.

He also points out that the Spanish civil war was never a purely Spanish event and that its pains and lessons continue to resonate - especially at a time when the far right is resurgent in Europe and beyond.

"Its origins and causes lay in Spanish domestic history, but, from the outset - and some people would argue even before the outset - it was an international conflict," says Shubert. "And it was a complex international conflict that can't be boiled down simply to democracy versus fascism - but certainly that was one of the elements in it. It mobilised people around the world in a way that no event had before, and perhaps never has since."

Cazorla-Sánchez, unsurprisingly, agrees. "The Spanish civil war matters because we should be aware that democracy is fragile," he says. "And it's always at the back of the minds of all democrats: we know our freedom can be taken away sooner than we think."

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Virtual Spanish civil war museum aims to cut through political divide

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Online history centre launches against backdrop of renewed debate over the conflict's legacy

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A DW article, exploring the way in which Eva Peron - and other historical characters - are represented in popular culture. 

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A DW article, exploring the way in which Eva Peron - and other historical characters - are represented in popular culture. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What role do the arts play in shaping our perceptions of historical characters?

KEY TERMS Legacy, Canonized, Popular culture

LINKS TO History, The arts, Politics

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She was loved and reviled in equal measure in Argentina: A saintly social justice warrior to some, a self-serving manipulator to others. But globally, Eva Peron remains a pop culture icon.

Evita Peron has long been immortalized in popular culture, including the 1996 film 'Evita' with Madonna in the lead role

Mention the name Eva Peron her fellow Argentines will likely differ on the legacy of the former Argentinian First Lady who died on this day 70 years ago.

Mention Evita to older generations in Europe or the United States and they might burst into a dramatic rendition of "Don't Cry For Me Argentina," the chart-topping torch song from the 1978 Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice hit musical.

From poor girl to first lady

The musical was based on Peron's rags-to-riches biography, though her storied life seemed predestined for recounting in books, films and on the stage.

Born into poverty on May 7, 1919, Maria Eva Duarte - nicknamed "Evita" or little Eva in Spanish - left her rural village of Los Toldos to pursue an acting career in Buenos Aires. There, the struggling actress met the soon-to-be Argentinian President Juan Domingo Peron.

Her life would be forever transformed.

Married soon after their meeting, Eva's husband was elected president the following year in 1946, making her the First Lady of Argentina at only the age of 27.

In the following six years, Evita, as she was known, championed labor rights and female suffrage. Besides running the Ministries of Labor and Health, she also founded and ran both the charitable Eva Peron Foundation as well as Argentina's first large-scale female political party, the Female Peronist Party.

A report by Australia's Special Broadcasting Service commemorating her 100th birthday in 2019, described Peron as having been "hated and loved with intensity in equal parts."

"Some saw her as a saint, a benefactress, a revolutionary, a woman determined to bring social justice to every corner of the country," the report added. "Others judged her as ambitious, adventurous, resentful, selfish and false, full of hatred and hypocritical."

Peron eventually succumbed to uterine cancer on July 26, 1952. She was only 33.

Canonized in popular culture

Peron is among those cult real-life figures whose stories continue to be immortalized through song and dance, both on stage and screen.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the prodigious American theater-writing team of composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist-dramatist Oscar Hammerstein II also produced a series of hit musicals for Broadway.

Two of their productions "The King and I" and "The Sound of Music" are based on the lives and reminiscence of Anna Leonowens and Maria von Trapp respectively.

Both were coincidentally governesses: Leonowens was an English governess to Thai King Mongkut's children in the early 1860s, while von Trapp, who originally planned to become a nun, ended up marrying the widowed Austrian Captain Georg von Trapp, whose seven children she had cared for.

While some creative liberties were taken with both stories, they boasted hit songs that are still popular.

Meanwhile, some recent musicals have also focused on diversity and inclusivity.

The 2013 Broadway adaptation of "Kinky Boots," the music and lyrics for which was written by 80s pop legend Cyndi Lauper, is based on the true story of Steve Pateman, who, inspired by drag queen Lola, tried to save his family-run shoe factory in Northamptonshire from closure by creating "Divine"-branded fetish footwear for men.

The film was a hit, for giving a platform to the LGBTIQ community and the biases they face.

Meanwhile, Lin-Manuel Miranda's multiple-award winning 2015 rap musical "Hamilton" tells the story of American founding father and first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, whose face graces the country's $10 note.

By casting non-white actors as the founding fathers, Miranda described the musical as being about "America then, as told by America now."

"Evita" remains a crowd-pleaser to this day, with productions being staged in various European countries, including Germany.

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Eva Peron: Legend lives on 70 years after her death - DW - 07/26/2022

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She was loved and reviled in equal measure in Argentina: A saintly social justice warrior to some, a self-serving manipulator to others. But globally, Eva Peron remains a pop culture icon.

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A Conversation article*, questioning whether the portrayal of Queen Cleopatra in a new Netflix series amounts to cultural appreciation or appropriation. 

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A Conversation article*, questioning whether the portrayal of Queen Cleopatra in a new Netflix series amounts to cultural appreciation or appropriation. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why has there been a backlash against Netflix’s new docuseries about Cleopatra? How does the article’s author, Marian Makkar, define cultural appropriation - and how close was your definition? How have the ‘questionable experts’ consulted by the show compounded the problem? Follow the link to the response by the show’s director, Tina Gharavi. How effectively does she defend the series from its detractors? Overall, what are our individual and group responsibilities when it comes to avoiding cultural divides?

KEY TERMS Cultural misrepresentation, Misplaced legitimacy, Indigenous cultural knowledge, experts, Cultural disrespect, Responsibilities

LINKS TO Indigenous societies, History, The arts

*We're proud to work in partnership with The Conversation. To sign up for their newsletter, which we draw on widely to create TOK lesson material, follow this link.

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Is Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra cultural appreciation or cultural appropriation?

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The backlash against Netflix’s documentary asks the question of how brands should take more responsibility when representing other cultures.

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A CNN article, looking at how a group of teachers from Texas considered reterming ‘slave trade’ as ‘involuntary relocation’. 

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A CNN article, looking at how a group of teachers from Texas considered reterming ‘slave trade’ as ‘involuntary relocation’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why did the board decide to rethink the term ‘Enslaved Peoples’? How does it change our understanding by using the term 'involuntary relocation’ instead of the ‘slave trade’? How is this linked to political affiliations in the USA? Overall, how do language and politics influence the way we understand the past, and how can we ensure that they do not undermine our objectivity?

KEY TERMS Contentious debate, Age-appropriate, Truthful knowledge, Accurate descriptions

LINKS TO History, Language, Politics, Human sciences

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A group of Texas educators proposed using the term ‘involuntary relocation’ rather than slavery when teaching 2nd graders | CNN

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A workgroup developing a second-grade social studies curriculum for the Texas State Board of Education last month suggested using the term “involuntary relocation” to describe people who were sold into slavery, the board’s chair said, amid national debates on the role of critical race theory in clas…

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A Guardian report, in which Olivette Otele discusses the justification for slavery reparations - or rather, restorative justice.

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A Guardian report, in which Olivette Otele discusses the justification for slavery reparations - or rather, restorative justice.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why do many people prefer the term restorative justice than reparations? Why is making connections with the past central to the work of reparations? Why does Otele draw a clear distinction between expressing regret, and saying sorry? Why does Otele argue that those who have suffered most from the brutality of slavery and colonialism should determine the restorative justice agenda? Overall, do students agree with Otele that, “Without understanding the history of slavery and colonialism, we cannot understand the extent to which societies today are shaped by systemic racism, unfair distribution of assets, inequality and violence”? Do we all share a responsibility to learn about the history of slavery?

KEY TERMS Addressing inequalities, Address the wrongs, Restorative justice, Making connections, Give up control and power, Collaborative process

LINKS TO History, Human sciences

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All over North America and Europe, universities, businesses and other organisations are investigating their historical connections to slavery. Some of these institutions once owned plantations or enslaved people. Others were established or maintained through donations from enslavers or their descendants. When an institution uncovers such histories, a question arises: what should the institution do to address the wrongs of the past, wrongs with consequences that continue to be felt today?

This question is part of a much larger debate: what does society owe the descendants of enslaved and colonised people? How can we measure the harms caused by the slave trade, slavery and colonialism when these harms span centuries and still shape our lives? Who can decide what ought to be done to repair these harms, and who should pay?

As a historian who specialises in the legacy and memory of slavery, these questions often land in my inbox. I have sat in dozens of meetings with board members of various institutions over the past few years - including those of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian - discussing how they should respond after discovering a historical link to slavery.

All these organisations wanted to publicly acknowledge that enslavement had led to a stratified society in which race and class intersect. However most of them were wary about facing demands for financial compensation, or a potential backlash from those who felt we should have moved on from slavery.

The idea of reparations is controversial, especially in countries that have failed to acknowledge that centuries of racial inequality have produced the stark social and economic inequalities of the present. Reparations start with this acknowledgement. The term "restorative justice", which I use interchangeably with "reparations", is usually associated with the legal system, as a method of dealing with crime. It prioritises repairing the harms suffered by the victim of an offence rather than punishing the perpetrator. It also seeks to understand the issues that caused the offence to happen.

When it comes to addressing the harms of slavery and colonialism, "restorative justice" is often a more palatable term than "reparations". Perhaps the latter seems coldly transactional, nothing more than a transfer of cash, whereas "restorative justice" implies collaboration and healing. But whichever term they use, groups that advocate for reparations almost never seek only money. Their work is grounded in an understanding that the social, the political and the economic are bound together and must be addressed together, creating the possibility of a better world.

Calls for such reparations have grown louder since 2020. The killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery in the US, followed by Black Lives Matter protests across the world, highlighted how often people are deemed dangerous and disposable, and how often the justice system fails them. Discussions about school and university curricula have revealed that certain aspects of the past are persistently obscured: both the inhumanity of colonial regimes and the longstanding and valuable contributions of minority ethnic communities.

Debates about reparations are both urgent and longstanding. Enslaved people have been demanding reparations since the 15th century, not long after European colonial enslavement began. One of the earliest recorded cases of reparations in the US (though "reparations" was not yet the term used) dates to 1783, when the state of Massachusetts ordered that a formerly enslaved woman, Belinda Royall, should receive a pension from the proceeds of her enslaver's estate, in acknowledgement of her unpaid labour.

Ironically, in the 19th century Britain and France voted that those who needed reparations were not the formerly enslaved but the enslavers. After the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, British plantation owners were granted huge compensation for the injury of having their "property" - enslaved people - taken from them.

At the heart of demands for reparations is the understanding that the past cannot be erased, and must not be ignored. Former colonial powers cannot undo the damage they inflicted on enslaved and colonised people, but they can engage in good faith with the descendants of those people, and work to address the systemic inequalities that exist today.

Yet 21st-century European and North American governments have resisted discussing reparations. When they do take steps to address present-day inequality and racism, they do so without explicitly connecting these problems to the legacies of slavery and empire. And so it is left to individual institutions to decide whether to investigate their histories, and what kind of reparations might be appropriate.

The efforts of these institutions, which are often beholden to shareholders, donors or alumni, are inevitably partial and constrained. However, there are reasons to be hopeful. Disorganised, insufficient and slow-paced as some of these initiatives may be, there are reasons to believe the debate will continue and intensify. There are grounds to trust in young people's demands for a fairer society. A post-reparations society may be on its way.

Making the connections

Greene King, which operates more than 2,500 pubs, restaurants and hotels in Britain, was founded by Benjamin Greene in 1799. He later became the owner of several plantations in the West Indies and was a vigorous supporter of slavery. In the 1830s, after the Slavery Abolition Act, he received compensation from the British government for having owned 225 enslaved people.

Almost two centuries later, in the summer of 2020, Greene King publicly acknowledged this history. The company announced a partnership with the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool; it promised to fund Black History Month initiatives, create opportunities for young people from Black and minority ethnic communities, and to develop a diversity strategy.

Its acknowledgement came the month after the murder of Floyd. On both sides of the Atlantic, demands to address centuries of racism were loud and heartfelt. But these demands were not new. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a leading American civil rights group, has been calling for reparations from the US government since the mid-2000s. The Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe was established in 2001.

Some of the calls for reparations have focused on the financial industry. Many banks founded before the 19th century had close connections with the slave trade, funding plantation owners or merchants who invested in slave voyages. In 2004 a group of descendants of enslaved people filed a lawsuit against the insurance market Lloyd's of London for financing the ships that transported their ancestors to North America. Lloyd's denied the claim, and it was dismissed the following year.

Years later, on the same day Greene King made its acknowledgement, Lloyd's publicly apologised for its role in the slave trade. It pledged to work on increasing diversity among its employees, and in 2021 appointed an archivist to research the company's involvement in slavery.

The terms "reparations" and "restorative justice" were absent from the announcements by Greene King and Lloyd's. Instead, both companies used the language of multiculturalism and diversity. Hiring more staff from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds was a priority.

Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays have similarly recognised their links to slavery and stated their support for "diversity and inclusion". But they have done so without making any clear connection between the past and the low numbers of their employees from minority ethnic backgrounds. Making these connections is central to the work of reparations. Without them, we can never have a full understanding of the consequences of slavery.

Some institutions have not progressed much beyond simply acknowledging the past. In 2020, the National Trust released a report on its buildings' links to slavery, attracting ferocious criticism from those who continue to celebrate the British empire, or who regard the trust as an institution outside of politics.

The Bank of England, which owned enslaved people in several Caribbean plantationsin the late 1700s, details this past in its current exhibition Slavery & the Bank. Some of the display materials mention that descendants of enslaved people have called for reparations, but there is no suggestion that the Bank will pay reparations, or that the effects of slavery still exist today.

A better model is offered by the Rowntree Society, an educational charity. In February 2020, it decided to study the Rowntree family's connections to slavery (I served as an external consultant). A little over a year later, the society and its various trusts released a statement recognising the "lasting damage inflicted by the colonial global economy in countries where the Rowntree businesses operated". In referring to this damage as ongoing, and in declaring that history is "not closed" and that its "legacies ... continue to shape the present", the Rowntree Society departed from the approach taken by many other institutions: it acknowledged that its actions in the past continue to cause harm in the present.

In North America, some of the first private institutions to consider reparations were universities, hundreds of which have links to slavery. In 2003, Brown University's first Black president, Ruth J Simmons, commissioned an investigation into the institution's connections to slavery. Three years later, the report made a number of recommendations, which included memorialising the past, creating a research centre for the study of slavery and providing support - financial and otherwise - to local communities negatively affected by Brown's past. Most of these recommendations were put into practice. But in 2021, undergraduates voted that Brown should give reparations to the descendants of enslaved people affiliated with the university. Nearly two years later, the university has revealed no plans to do so.

$100m
Amount pledged by Harvard University to carry out recommendations from its 2022 report into its links to slavery

In the past few years, many more American universities have studied their links to slavery. In April 2022, Harvard released a report representing three years of research. The university's president pledged $100m (£80m) to carry out the report's recommendations, which included building relationships with the descendants of enslaved people who laboured within the university, or were enslaved by Harvard associates.

In 2019, Glasgow University became the first British university to set up a restorative justice scheme, pledging £20m to build a research centre in partnership with the University of the West Indies, for the study of public health and economic growth in the Caribbean, and the relationship between Caribbean and African countries. After Glasgow's commitment, other universities began to examine their past.

The University of Cambridge's main report into its involvement with slavery was released in September 2022. This report, for which I served on the external advisory board, is the product of rigorous research. Its recommendations are grouped into four themes: funding further research, memorialisation, engaging with Black British communities and developing links with universities in west Africa and the Caribbean. These recommendations are far less ambitious than Brown's or Harvard's, and the timeframe remains vague. Nevertheless, they leave open the door for further discussions, and for engagement with communities throughout Britain.

Earlier this month, following the recommendations of the University of Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement inquiry, the university's Trinity College announced plans to appoint an academic to work on its legacies of slavery. It also pledged to allocate £1m over five years to scholarships, including those specifically for Caribbean students. The college did not explicitly state that these initiatives were forms of reparations or part of any restorative justice plan. Nor did it mention any consultation with reparation groups in the UK or the Caribbean.

In February, the Trevelyan family, who are said to have once enslaved 1,000 people in Grenada, made a public apology. The family, who were awarded £34,000 in compensation after slavery was abolished in 1833, once owned Wallington Hall. The Northumberland country house stayed in the family for 150 years before being passed on to the National Trust. The Trevelyans announced that they planned to assign a community fund of £100,000 to the economic development of the island of Grenada. This extraordinary move raised questions about the sum allocated and how closely the family worked with other Caribbean groups such as the Caribbean Community (Caricom). However, the Grenada National Reparations Commission described the attempt at addressing the wrongs of the past as commendable.

This kind of engagement is absent from many institutions' efforts. Such absence, as well as the vastly different approaches taken by universities and organisations across Britain, reflect a lack of comprehension of what restorative justice requires: both an acknowledgement of continuing harm and sustained discussions with communities who have been shaped by slavery.

Regret is not equal to apology

Calls for compensation for victims of slavery began centuries ago, initiated by enslaved and formerly enslaved people themselves. In 1778, after slavery had been outlawed in the state of Vermont, Pompey Brakkee, an enslaved man, sued his "master" for refusing to free him. Towards the end of the American civil war, Gen William T Sherman ordered that freed families should receive a plot of land and the means to farm it ("40 acres and a mule"). This radical plan for land redistribution emerged from Sherman's discussions with Black Christian ministers. The order was reversed by President Andrew Johnson months later.

In the century after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, European powers were less concerned with compensating formerly enslaved people than with establishing and maintaining their own empires. During the first half of the 20th century, European countries looked back on their colonial enterprises as philanthropic and "civilising", rather than as exploitative and economically motivated. But after the second world war, as more colonies declared independence, groups across the world put pressure on European governments to address the harms they had caused.

In 2001, reparations was one of the key questions of the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa. Even having the subject on the agenda was hugely controversial, and participating countries disagreed fiercely about the language of the final declaration, which ultimately left each to make up its own mind about whether to pursue reparations.

France declared slavery a crime against humanity and began a programme of memorialisation and education. Other countries, led by Britain, refused to issue a formal apology, fearing that to do so could result in a legal obligation to pay reparations. Instead, regret was deemed a safer response. In 2006, the prime minister, Tony Blair, expressed "deep sorrow" for the slave trade. His statement included a call to "rejoice at the different and better times we live in today". These words obscured the fact that the times are still profoundly shaped by the existence of slavery.

In 2014, Caricom, which is composed of 15 member states, put forward a 10-point reparations plan. Among other demands, it called for a formal apology from European governments; a repatriation programme for people of African descent in the Caribbean wishing to return to Africa; European investment in Caribbean public health and literacy programmes, and debt cancellation. Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and other former colonial powers rejected the plan.

The nearest example we have of a state undertaking reparative justice measures, and acknowledging them as such, is the Netherlands. Last December, the government apologised for the country's role in slavery and established a fund of €200m (£170m) to raise awareness of the Netherlands' history as a colonial power, as well as "fostering engagement" and "addressing the present-day effects of slavery". However, the apology was seen by some descendants of enslaved people in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean as having been sprung on them without warning and little collaboration. The Netherlands government said it would consult on future plans with descendant communities.

We cannot allow countries to leave the work of reparations to individual institutions, which will naturally have their own priorities and agendas. Not only do governments have the capacity to offer reparations on a far larger scale but, most importantly, countries, not just institutions and individuals, invested in and benefited from slavery.

Pro-slavery laws were passed in the British parliament; Britain's wealth, like that of many European countries, derives in part from slavery and empire. Regret is not equal to apology, but when Blair expressed regret on behalf of the UK, he at least made it plain that if you live in the UK, your life has been shaped by the legacies of slavery - even if you have never been to a Greene King pub, visited a National Trust property or invested with Barclays.

Giving up power and control

Some institutional efforts seem little more than a public relations exercise. Others simply repurpose a company's existing diversity policies. One could reasonably argue that such corporate initiatives can and should be part of a reparations strategy. But too often reparative agendas begin and end in the institutions that develop them, with little consideration for the work that must be done in society as a whole.

The wider political context also shapes institutional thinking, especially for those institutions whose funding derives partly from the government. Last year, the minister for women and equalities, Kemi Badenoch, announced a history curriculum overhaul, under which children would receive a so-called balanced account of the British empire, learning about its "benefits" as well as its horrors. Given such announcements, it is unsurprising that universities and cultural institutions produce reports that sound progressive but are not too ambitious or contentious.

Controversies over how we should remember the past, such as rows over statues as well as the school syllabus, can paradoxically distract from the inequalities and discrimination that exist in the present. Worsening income inequality, growing poverty, hunger and homelessness are, of course, experienced disproportionately by the descendants of enslaved and colonised people.

Those who have suffered most from the brutality of slavery and colonialism should determine the restorative justice agenda. This requires institutions to give up control and power - something that many are unwilling to do. Even scholarly research into communities affected by slavery can be exploitative, with few research grants going to academics from these communities.

Restorative justice, in the context of the legal system, divides participants into victims and perpetrators. Some reparations groups challenge this division, pointing out that it positions enslaved Africans and their descendants as powerless. We know that people of African descent, forcibly transported across the ocean, were instrumental in their liberation. We know that today, marginalised communities continue to share histories on their own terms, and to push for reparations. The Pan-Afrikan Stop the Maangamizi campaign has called for a parliamentary commission of inquiry for truth and reparatory justice in Britain. The Black Curriculum works to bring Black British history into schools, while in Wales an inclusive curriculum is on its way. Restorative justice is inherently a collaborative process, one that requires institutions to share some of their power.

The brutal past, the bleak present

For too long, we have been told lies about the past. Even during decolonisation in the second half of the 20th century, colonial powers scrambled to portray themselves as benevolently granting independence after centuries of enlightened rule. But over the past few decades, new narratives have emerged. These narratives challenge the old monochromatic tales of brave conquests and civilising missions. They reveal the brutality of the past and the bleak realities of the present: continuing discrimination, inequality, trauma and violence.

Such realities must not be ignored. Without understanding the history of slavery and colonialism, we cannot understand the extent to which societies today are shaped by systemic racism, unfair distribution of assets, inequality and violence - and how all of these have led to despair, marginalisation and disenfranchisement in parts of the population.

Restorative justice, which recognises the role of marginalised groups, is key to enabling people to lead decent and dignified lives. A post-reparations world might acknowledge the complexity of the colonial past in its entirety, including the damage caused by racial hierarchy; it would not be afraid to discuss the ways in which race and ethnicity, class, gender, religion, ableism and age intersect. A post-reparations society would focus on education and civic participation so that current and future generations can address the challenges of climate change, health inequalities, systemic racism, gender-based violence and poverty; it could encourage us to rethink the notion of happiness, one that is not based on instant and individual gratification but on collective achievement. It would be a society able to build a reconciled collective memory.

As the populations of North America and many European countries become more diverse, and as wealth inequality continues to grow and climate change disproportionately affects the descendants of colonised people, we can expect calls for reparations to become increasingly loud.

We will also hear loud objections, from those who benefit from the status quo or who cannot imagine a different world. But it is only through confronting the past that we can reimagine our future - and it is only through reparations that this new future can take shape.

British slavery and reparations in numbers

3.1 million
The estimated number of enslaved Africans Britain transported to its colonies between 1640 and 1807. This accounted for 50% of all enslaved Africans kidnapped and transported to the colonies during that period. About 2.7 million are thought to have survived the gruelling journey, known as the "middle passage", and been forcibly resettled in the Caribbean, North and South America, and elsewhere. It was the largest forced migration in human history.

1787
The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded. The movement to abolish the slave trade grew in the decades that followed, drawing widespread support across the country.

1783
A formerly enslaved woman, Belinda Royall, won one of the first recorded cases of reparations in the US in the form of a pension.

1791
Thousands of enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) rose up against slavery in a revolution that was pivotal for the global abolitionist movement.

1807
Britain passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which formally ended the country's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.

£20 m
The Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which abolished slavery in most British colonies, included a £20m compensation package for enslavers, approximately 40% of the government's total annual expenditure.

2013
Caribbean heads of state formally established the Caricom Reparations Commission. The 10-point plan called for debt cancellation as well as funding for a repatriation programme, cultural institutions, public health, a literacy campaign, psychological rehabilitation, and technology transfer.

2015
British taxpayers fully repaid the money borrowed by the government to compensate enslavers.

2019
The University of Glasgow became the first university in Britain to set up a restorative justice scheme, which pledges £20m to build a research centre in partnership with the University of the West Indies.

2022
The Dutch government formally apologised for its historical role in slavery.

0
The amount of financial compensation Britain has paid to enslaved people and their descendants still stands at zero.
Additional research by Aamna Mohdin Sign up for the Cotton Capital newsletter for a weekly look at the series and next steps, direct to your inbox
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More than money: the logic of slavery reparations | Olivette Otele

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It's not just about payment. It is about engaging in good faith with the descendants of enslaved people and addressing inequalities - to make a better future possible

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A Conversation article, examining the history behind Russia’s claim that they have entered Ukraine in order to rid it of Nazism. 

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A Conversation article, examining the history behind Russia’s claim that they have entered Ukraine in order to rid it of Nazism. 

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UNPACKING THE ARTICLE This article provides a nice overview of the history of relations between Ukraine and Russia, and shows the importance of being objective with your selection of evidence when you try to understand the past. What claims have been made to justify the invasion of Ukraine? How do these stand up to historical scrutiny? What else do we learn about the present conflict by looking at the past? What role does the selection of evidence play in our understanding of the past? Do students think that it is possible to understand politics and current events without a full understanding of history?

KEY TERMS Justifies, Selective telling of the past

LINKS TO History, Politics

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Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies his war on Ukraine as a peacekeeping mission, a " denazification " of the country.

In his address to the Russian people on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin said the purpose was to "protect people" who had been "subjected to bullying and genocide ... for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine."

The victims of the genocide claimed by Putin are Russian speakers; the Nazis he referenced are the elected representatives of the Ukrainian people. While Ukraine's new language laws have upset some minorities, independent news media have uncovered no evidence of genocide against Russian speakers. In fact, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, Russian speakers have more freedom in Ukraine than they have in Russia, where Putin's authoritarian government routinely suppresses political dissent. And while far right groups have been growing in Ukraine, their electoral power is limited.

As the author of a recently published book on anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and a historian of the Holocaust, I know why the accusations of Nazism and genocide have resonance in Ukraine. But I also understand that despite episodic violence, Ukrainian history offers a model of tolerance and democratic government.

Ukraine's Jewish leadership

First, it is worth pointing out that Ukraine today is a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won a five-year term in the 2019 presidential election with a landslide majority, defeating 39 candidates. His Servant of the People party then swept the parliamentary elections in July 2019, winning 254 seats in the 450-seat chamber, becoming the first majority government in the history of the modern Ukrainian state. Zelensky was well-known as a comedian and star of the popular sitcom " Servant of the People," from which his party's name was derived.

AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

The fact that Zelensky is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and was raised in what he told The Times of Israel was " an ordinary Soviet Jewish family" was barely noted during the election. "Nobody cares. Nobody asks about it," he remarked in the same interview. Nor did Ukrainians seem to mind that the prime minister at the time of Zelensky's election, Volodymyr Groysman, also had a Jewish background.

For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. " How could I be a Nazi?" Zelensky asked in a public address after the Russian invasion began. "Explain it to my grandfather."

The pogroms against Jews

Sporadic episodes of violence against Jews, or pogroms, began well before the Holocaust. In 1881, for instance, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ordinary churchgoers, laborers, railway workers and soldiers attacked Jewish-owned shops, mills and canteens, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Jews in what was then considered the south of Russia, but is now Ukraine. During another wave of violence following the Revolution of 1905, workers, peasants and soldiers, egged on by Russian right-wing paramilitary groups, murdered 5,000 Jews in the region.

During the unrest that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, about 100,000 Jews died as a result of attacks perpetrated against them by soldiers fighting to restore a united Russia, as well as by the armies of the newly established Ukrainian and Polish states.

Finally, during the Second World War, German soldiers murdered 1.5 million Jews in the areas that are now Ukraine, often with the collaboration of Ukrainian militias established in the diaspora and with the help of local auxiliary police. The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today, where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honored.

AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

Yet at the same time, millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians lost their lives under the Nazis or were exploited as slave laborers. The occupiers treated Ukrainian lands as little more than Lebensraum, living space for ethnic Germans.

A pluralistic state

Forgotten in this history is the period between 1917 and 1919 when an independent Ukrainian state offered a different model of multiculturalism and pluralism. The Ukrainian state that declared its independence from Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolutions, envisioned a Ukraine for all ethnicities and religious groups living within its territory.

One of its first acts was passing the Law on National Autonomy in January 1918, which allowed each of the major ethnic minority groups - Russians, Jews, and Poles - broad autonomous rights, including the right to use their own language.

The cabinet included a Secretariat of National Affairs, with vice-secretariats for Russians, Jews and Poles, and, briefly in 1919, even a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. The legislative body, as well, included proportional representation from each of the national minorities. The state issued declarations and currency printed in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.

However, this state, hailed by Jews around the world as a model for the new nation states then emerging in eastern and central Europe, never managed to hold the capital for more than a few months at a time. By April of 1919, the government was being run from a moving train and could barely claim more land than the tracks beneath it.

From its inauguration in January 1918, Ukraine found itself enmeshed in a bloody war on multiple fronts. The Soviet Red Army attacked it from the east, while Moscow sought to ignite Bolshevik revolutions throughout Ukraine. A Russian White Army led by officers from the old tsarist army attacked from the south, hoping to reestablish a version of the Russian Empire. From the west, the army of the newly established Polish Republic attacked with the goal of restoring historic Poland's borders.

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At the same time, a range of insurgent fighters and anarchists formed militias to seize land for themselves. In the midst of this chaos, the dream of a pluralistic state devolved into inter-ethnic violence.

In March 1921, the war ended with the Treaty of Riga, incorporating much of the territory claimed by the independent Ukrainian state into the Soviet Union.

Putin's selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state's historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.

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Putin's claim to rid Ukraine of Nazis is especially absurd given its history

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A Holocaust historian explains why Ukrainian history needs to be understood in terms of both past violence against Jews as well as the state's pluralistic vision.

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A History Today article, which argues that the term ‘Viking’ misleads us when we study this period of history, and should be replaced. 

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A History Today article, which argues that the term ‘Viking’ misleads us when we study this period of history, and should be replaced. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does Woolf argue the term ‘Viking’ is misleading? What other effects does it have on our understanding, apart from mislead us (hint - he uses the term “racist essentialism”)? Overall, how can the incorrect use of language “seriously distort” our understanding of identity and culture from the past?

KEY TERMS Warping our perception, Ethnicisation, Contexts, Racist essentialism

LINKS TO History, Language

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A History Today article, questioning the cliche of whether history is written by the victors.

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A History Today article, questioning the cliche of whether history is written by the victors.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Students can divide into different groups, and focus on one of the four historians consulted in the article: Levi Roach, Lucy Wooding, Philipp Therr, and Bridget Heal. What is the main point they make, related to the ‘victors writing history’ - and what examples do they give? How does this help us develop a more nuanced understanding of the way historical knowledge is produced? Overall, do students agree with Lucy Wooding that, “history is not written by the winners, so much as history is hijacked by those trying to win”?

KEY TERMS Historical clichés, Preservation of knowledge, Power, Interpretation, Diversity and multiplicity, Victory vs. truth, Western hubris, Deforming perspective

LINKS TO History, Human sciences, Politics

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It’s the most tired of historical clichés, but is it so for a reason? Who writes history? Four would-be winners debate.

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A World Economic Forum article, discussing the decision by the Netherlands that they will be returning all stolen colonial era artefacts. 

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A World Economic Forum article, discussing the decision by the Netherlands that they will be returning all stolen colonial era artefacts. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is huge news from the Netherlands, and will have big implications for museums throughout the world (contrast the Netherlands' decision with the determination of the British government to hang on to the Elgin Marbles). It prompts us to think about the nature of cultural heritage, and its relationship to us. In what way do artifacts ‘belong’ to a culture? How do we ascertain their ‘meaning’? Who, ultimately, owns culture and art?

KEY TERMS Culture, Perspectives, Belong, Meaning

LINKS TO Indigenous societies, History, The arts

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Arts and Culture

The Netherlands National Museum of World Cultures will search its collections for "stolen" colonial-era artefacts. Image: Museum Volkenkunde

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Stolen colonial-era objects will be 'unconditionally' returned, says the Netherlands

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Dutch state collections should have no place for items acquired by theft, the government says.

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A Nature video, looking at how a new AI tool can help historians to decipher ancient texts. 

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A Nature video, looking at how a new AI tool can help historians to decipher ancient texts. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does the work of Thea Sommerschield, and Yannis Assael indicate about the usefulness of interdisciplinary collaboration? How does Ithaca work - and what can it do that humans can’t? Overall, what does this story indicate about the potential of human-AI collaboration in producing knowledge about history and the humanities?

KEY TERMS Clues, Complex, Cooperative, Guess, Evidence, Collaboration

LINKS TO History, Language, Technology

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The AI historian: A new tool to decipher ancient texts

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A Guardian article, asking the question, ‘Can history teach us anything about the future of war and peace?’ 

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A Guardian article, asking the question, ‘Can history teach us anything about the future of war and peace?’ 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Can we predict the future by studying the past?

KEY TERMS Evidence, Quantitative comparative conclusions, Statistics, Meaningful patterns, Awkward truth

LINKS TO History, Politics, Human sciences

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Ten years ago, the psychologist Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he argued that violence in almost all its forms - including war -was declining. The book was ecstatically received in many quarters, but then came the backlash, which shows no signs of abating. In September, 17 historians published a riposte to Pinker, suitably entitled The Darker Angels of ,in which they attacked his "fake history" to "debunk the myth of non-violent modernity". Some may see this as a storm in an intellectual teacup, but the central question - can we learn anything about the future of warfare from the ancient past? - remains an important one.

Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature. Photograph: Jason Longo/BBC/WGBH

Pinker thought we could and he supported his claim of a long decline with data stretching thousands of years back into prehistory. But among his critics are those who say that warfare between modern nation states, which are only a few hundred years old, has nothing in common with conflict before that time, and therefore it's too soon to say if the supposed "long peace" we've been enjoying since the end of the second world war is a blip or a sustained trend.

In 2018, for example, computer scientist Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado Boulder crunched data on wars fought between 1823 and 2003 and concluded that we'd have to wait at least another century to find out. Clauset doesn't think it would help to add older data into the mix; indeed, he thinks it would muddy the picture.

"It's up to researchers who study sub-state-level violence to substantiate their claims that the dynamics of such violence are relevant to the dynamics of war and, in my view, they haven't done a great job there," he says.

Most researchers accept that there is a difference between war and interpersonal violence - and that these two things are governed by different forces - but there is disagreement over where to draw the line between them. Historian and archaeologist Ian Morris of Stanford University, author of War! What Is it Good For? (2014), is among those who say that the nature of collective violence hasn't changed much in millennia, it's just that human groups were smaller in the past. For him, therefore, a massacre of a couple of dozen of hunter-gatherers in Sudan around about 13,000 years ago, the earliest known example of collective violence, is relevant to a discussion of modern warfare.

Archaeologist Detlef Gronenborn of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz, Germany, agrees. In 2015, he and others described a massacre among Europe's earliest farmers at a place called Schöneck-Kilianstädten in Germany, about 7,000 years ago. More than two dozen individuals were killed by blunt force instruments or arrows and dumped in a mass grave, their lower legs having been systematically broken either just before or just after death. The absence of young women from the group suggested that the attackers may have kidnapped them. Gronenborn says that massacres of entire communities were frequent occurrences in Europe at that time and that one of their hallmarks, judging by the human remains, was the desire to erase the victims' identity. "The only difference between then and now is that of scale," he says.

But while some researchers may agree with Pinker that prehistoric and modern warfare are essentially the same phenomenon, they don't necessarily agree with him that the evidence points to a long-term decline. Pinker based his claim that prehistory was extremely violent on around 20 archaeological sites spanning 14,000 years. Those sites unequivocally attest to ancient violence, says historian Dag Lindström of Uppsala University in Sweden, "but they cannot be used for quantitative comparative conclusions". We simply have no way of knowing how representative they were.

Collective violence has been one way in which societies have reorganised themselves to become more humane and prosperous

"The further you go back in time, the more difficult it becomes to have an accurate assessment of how many people died in battle," says historian Philip Dwyer of the University of Newcastle in Australia, who co-edited The Darker Angels of Our Nature. Civilian death counts are even less reliable, he says, and have likely been significantly underestimated throughout history. In Dwyer's view, all war-related statistics are suspect, undermining attempts to identify long-term trends.

Others think the statistics can be informative. Gronenborn's work isfeeding into larger scale efforts to identify and explain patterns in collective violence. One such effort is the Historical Peace Index (HPI), a collaboration between Oxford University and the group behind Seshat: Global History Databank - a scientific research project of the nonprofit Evolution Institute - to map warfare globally over the past 5,000 years. Their goal, as the name suggests, is to try to understand the causes and consequences of war, with a view to building more peaceful and stable societies.

The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers during the Battle of Cambrai, 1917. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The argument of those taking this kind of approach is that the more data you gather, the more you can identify meaningful patterns. Gronenborn, for example, says that it is beginning to look as if collective violence was cyclical in neolithic Europe. One hypothesis he and others are testing is that mounting internal social tensions fuelled explosions of violence, with external shocks such as climate fluctuations acting as triggers.

The awkward truth is that collective violence has been one way in which societies have reorganised themselves to become more humane and prosperous. But as societies changed, so did the reasons they went to war.

"People always want to know: what was the earliest war?" says bioarchaeologist Linda Fibiger of Edinburgh University. "But it would be more interesting to ask: how did neolithic people define violence? What was their concept of war?"

Any debate over the decline - or not - of war must take into account its changing nature, Dwyer says, adding that it didn't stop changing 200 years ago. In the decades since the second world war, for example, major international conflicts have become less frequent, but small wars have proliferated. This has happened, argues Yale University historian Samuel Moyn in his new book, , in part because over the 20th century the justification for war shifted to peacekeeping and the defence of human rights, ensuring that war shrank in scale but became "for ever".

The trouble with small-scale wars, as Clauset and others have found, is that they have a strong tendency to escalate, especially if they go on for a long time. In 2019, political scientist Bear Braumoeller of Ohio State University published Only the Dead, in which he argued that the risk of escalation today was as high as it had been when European leaders sent their troops to war in the summer of 1914, believing they would be home by Christmas.

"When it comes to the propensity of war to spiral out of control and produce mind-boggling death tolls, we live in the same world that they lived in," he wrote.

Why war escalates so easily is not well understood, but Braumoeller says it's a "good bet" that technology is a factor. Scientist Peter Turchin of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, one of Seshat's co-founders, agrees. He says that stepwise advances in military technology - he calls them "military revolutions" - may have been major drivers of collective violence.

The military revolution, singular, is the term historians use to describe the period of rapid technological and social change that began in the 16th century with the advent of portable firearms. But Turchin says there were others. One of the most important got under way about 3,000 years ago, across a swath of Eurasia south of the steppes, when archers armed with iron-tipped arrows first mounted horses.

Each time, the technology handed an advantage to those who had it, stimulating a technological and eventually social arms race. And that technology wasn't even necessarily devised for military ends. The farming revolution, which ushered in the neolithic period, was also a military revolution, because the advances that gave farmers new tools also gave them new weapons. And some have argued that war became more lethal in the early 1800s in part because of the newfound ease of moving troops and supplies by rail.

"The upshot was that, with more soldiers on a given battlefield, it took more deaths on both sides to win a battle and therefore more deaths to win a war," Braumoeller says.

Many people perceive technological change to be accelerating. The 20th century saw at least one military revolution, as a result of which we have nuclear weapons and the capacity to wage war in space. The early nuclear weapons were so destructive and so bad at hitting targets that they acted as effective deterrents and helped usher in this current period of stability, Morris says, but counterintuitively, we may have more grounds to worry now that they are generally smaller and more precise.

Morris sees parallels between the period we're living through now and the late 19th century, when international conflicts were few, but small-scale insurgencies and civil wars proliferated, and some of them, such as the Boer war, spiralled out of control. That long peace was finally shattered in 1914 and this one will be eventually too, he thinks.

What the cause and who the belligerent parties will be in the war that breaks the peace is not yet possible to say of course, though there has been much speculation - for example that it may involve Chinese military action against Taiwan. Nevertheless, for those who believe that the past can be instructive about the present, just not in the way Pinker does, Better Angels recalls a slew of books published on the eve of the first world war that proclaimed that war between the great powers was a thing of the past.

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Can history teach us anything about the future of war - and peace?

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A decade on from psychologist Steven Pinker's declaration that violence is declining, historians show no sign of agreeing a truce

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A Big Think article, analyzing how difficult it is to distinguish fact from fiction when we study Stalinist Russia (and history in general). 

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A Big Think article, analyzing how difficult it is to distinguish fact from fiction when we study Stalinist Russia (and history in general). 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a great little article highlighting the difficulties of getting to the truth about the past - and looking at what we can and cannot believe. First, what are the details of the chicken story? Get students to offer their thoughts on whether it sounds credible. Then look at the article in more detail: what problems are there with this story in particular, stories about Stalin in general, and even more broadly, historical evidence that we can’t properly verify? Why are stories like this often in circulation, and should we discard them? Overall, what level of certainty should be required in order to judge a past event as true?

KEY TERMS Evidence, Anecdote, Unverifiable

LINKS TO History, Politics

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There's a popular anecdote about Joseph Stalin that goes as follows. One day, the dictator of the Soviet Union told his closest advisors that he would show them how easy it was to control a person that had already been subjugated. He brought in a live chicken, which he then proceeded to pluck until it was naked and bleeding.

"Now, watch where the chicken goes," Stalin said as he put it on the ground. Finally freed from its torturer's grasp, the chicken wasted no time getting away. However, when it failed to find an exit, it readily returned to Stalin and attempted to warm itself between the dictator's legs. Stalin then took out some grain from his pocket, which he fed to the chicken.

The chicken ate the grain despite the pain. When Stalin started to walk around the room, the chicken timidly followed, leaving a small trail of blood wherever it went. "So, you see," Stalin said to his advisors, smiling. "People are like chickens. You pluck them, and then let them go. Then you can control them."

This simple, sinister anecdote has been around for many years. During the Cold War, it was frequently cited by journalists as proof that the Soviet government relied on fear to keep their population under control. Today, conservatives sometimes share the same story on social media as part of a more questionable effort to warn against the dangers of socialism.

However, like many things shared on social media, there is little to no evidence that the events described in this anecdote actually happened. Consequently, the anecdote should be interpreted not as an example of Stalin's cruelty, but a testament to how difficult it is to distinguish fact from fiction when you're talking about controversial periods or people.

Fact or fiction: Joseph Stalin

Given all the other anecdotes we have been told about Joseph Stalin, the chicken story seems perfectly plausible. When questioned about the Holodomor, a state-sanctioned famine that led to the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians, Stalin is believed to have said: "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

In a 1988 interview, the Soviet playwright Mikhail Shatrov implied that Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, had committed suicide after being viciously berated by her husband during a dinner party. Other accounts claim that Stalin heard the gun go off in the anteroom, but kept on partying as if nothing had happened.

When Stalin's son Yakov was denied permission to marry the daughter of an Orthodox priest, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest. According to Stalin's own daughter, Svetlana, the dictator was displeased to hear that the bullet had narrowly missed his son's heart. His response: "The boy can't even shoot straight."

In truth, many of these tall tales turn out to be false, embellished, or unverifiable. According to Moscow Times journalist Julia Solovyova, Russian historians were unable to find evidence for Stalin's comment on the Holodomor. Later, it was discovered that the quote had been wrongly attributed to Stalin, and actually belonged to a French diplomat instead.

Similarly, historian Oleg Khlevniuk describes the uncertainty surrounding the circumstances of Nadezdha's suicide: "Perhaps Stalin drank too much and started openly flirting with some of the wives. Perhaps Nadezhda was simply in a bad mood or Stalin said something hurtful to her. Or perhaps she was the one who provoked an argument."

Retracing the origins of the chicken story

Upon closer inspection, the chicken anecdote seems to fall apart as well. Of the hundred or so biographies that are available online, not one discusses the incident. The first and only mention of it that Big Think was able to find is in a book titled Have the Mountains Fallen? Two Journeys of Loss and Redemption in the Cold Warby journalist Jeffrey B. Lilley.

The book isn't so much concerned with Joseph Stalin as it is with Chinghiz Torekulovich Aitmatov, a Kyrgyz author whom the fact-checking website Snopes credits with popularizing and possibly even inventing the chicken story. As mentioned by Lilley, Aitmatov first heard the "apocryphal tale" from one of the elders in his home village of Sheker, not long after Stalin's death in 1953.

Had the same story been told when Stalin was still alive, the elder might not have lived to see another day. While in power, Stalin worked tirelessly to build and maintain a savior-like image, and slandering his name was punishable by death; during World War II, the poet Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to the gulag for questioning Stalin's military decisions.

After Stalin's death, however, criticism of the fallen leader was briefly encouraged. In 1956, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered a speech condemning Stalin as a "sickly suspicious" individual whose paranoia and terror sanctioned "the most brutal violation of socialist legality." A new period of de-Stalinization was ushered in, and unsavory stories of the dictator's cruelty spread like wildfire.

The validity of these stories proved difficult to ascertain. Stalin's rule, which had resulted in the deaths of millions of citizens, left not a single unbiased storyteller, and the long-awaited absence of persecution may well have caused imaginations to run wild. On top of that, the secrecy with which Stalin had surrounded himself while in power made fact-checking almost impossible.

Stalin's cult of personality endures

The validity of the chicken story in particular has been called into question due to the nature of Aitmatov's writing, which an obituary published by Reuters described as "elliptical" and "allegorical." The author frequently explained historical events by identifying parallels with myths and legends, giving his work a larger-than-life feel that evidently carried over in his depiction of Joseph Stalin.

According to Lilley, this depiction may have been politically motivated. Aitmatov wrote about it during the early days of the Gorbachev administration, whose "glasnost and perestroika" campaign tried to steer the Soviet Union into a more humane direction, one where criticizing the party or its violent past would no longer cause you to end up in prison.

Once again, the legacy of Stalin was recontextualized, and everyone seemed to have a different opinion. Mikhail Gorbachev, in spite of his progressive lawmaking, proved unwilling to denounce his predecessor. What bothered him weren't Stalin's crimes against humanity, but the fact that Russia's enemies routinely used him as a means "to discredit the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole."

Aitmatov disagreed vehemently. "Only now," he exclaimed in 1987, "have we begun to free ourselves from being slaves of the personality cult." As the Soviet Union's power on the world stage began to dwindle, some Soviet citizens - especially the older ones - were growing nostalgic for Stalin's strongman rule and the deadly force it represented.

The Kyrgyz author, whose family, country, and culture had suffered greatly under that same rule, considered this to be a great danger. The way he saw it, Gorbachev's tolerance presented an opportunity to finally rid the Russian people from Stalin's brainwashing. This, Aitmatov believed, had to be done by any and all means necessary, and it may have inspired him to edit and spread the chicken story.

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Did Stalin really pluck a live chicken to show how he controlled the masses?

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Distinguishing fact from fiction can be tough, especially insofar as it relates to controversial individuals like Joseph Stalin.

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A History Today article, looking at the problem of writing history when you don’t possess all the facts about what happened.

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A History Today article, looking at the problem of writing history when you don’t possess all the facts about what happened.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What are the challenges of relying on facts to understand the past, and creating an objective understanding of the past? Students can also access this New Yorker article, which asks the question, Who decides what becomes history? Students can focus on its assertion that “When we listen to a tale, we need to take into account the teller.” Access the TOK mini-lesson here.

KEY TERMS Facts, Objective, Representation vs. mirror of reality, Biases, Perspectives

LINKS TO History

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What I love most about Livy's Ab urbe condita is that it is not all there. In its day it was monumental, of course. Written in instalments over almost 40 years, it covered the entire period from the legendary foundation of Rome to the death of Drusus in 9 BC. Had Livy lived longer, it is possible that he would have continued the narrative down to his own day. It was an extraordinary piece of work. Even before Livy had finished writing, contemporaries hailed it as a masterpiece. Though a little prolix in places, it was distinguished by its relentless detail, its acute sensitivity for human emotion and what Quintilian called its 'milky prose'. No other Roman historian even came close. So high was Livy's renown, in fact, that he may have helped drive his sources into obscurity. Of the annalists on whom he relied for information, almost nothing has survived - not because they suffered from any particular fault per se, but perhaps partly because readers may have felt that, after Livy, they were superfluous.

Yet Livy may also have been a victim of his own success. Such was the popularity of Ab urbe condita that some enterprising soul soon produced an epitome - just as, today, a Tolkien enthusiast might write a 'Bluffer's Guide' to The Lord of the Rings. This epitome was then further abridged to produce the so-called Periochae. Short to the point of brusqueness, these summarised the main topics covered by each book and were probably intended to serve as a rudimentary table of contents. But so convenient did some readers find the Periochae that they actually preferred them to Livy's original. In the first century AD Martial wryly intimated that, since his bookshelves were not big enough to hold all of Livy, the shorter work was the more practical. Combined with shifts in literary fashion and the usual vicissitudes of time, this may have contributed to the loss of large sections of Livy's history. Of its 142 original books, only 35 remain in reasonably complete form.

Telling it like it was?

In some ways, Livy's fate is a neat encapsulation of the problems with which modern historians have to grapple. Since at least the mid-19th century it has been recognised that the task of history is to determine what actually happened in the past - or, as Leopold von Ranke memorably put it, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist ('how it actually was'). To do this, we first need facts - that is to say, information that can be verified. This can sometimes be tricky. After all, there are plenty of events for which we have only a single witness. But this is just the start. On their own, facts are simply isolated details. It doesn't mean all that much, for example, to know that a battle was fought at Hastings in 1066. What we are reallyinterested in is how facts fit together to reveal broader patterns. Rather than merely taking them at face value, as it were, the historian has to interpret them to make an argument - transforming them, in effect, from mere data into evidence. And this is where texts like Livy's Ab urbe condita become so important. Documents are our main source, both for facts themselves and for insights into how those facts might fit together. Livy, for example, tells us not only that the Roman plebs marched out of the city en masse in around 494 BC, but also that they did so in protest at the Senate's increasingly harsh decrees about the punishment of debtors, who tended to come from the lower orders.

Documents aren't always as helpful as we'd like, however. While they might be chock full of details and tell a convincing 'story' about the past, there is no such thing as an 'objective' text. They are, at root, a representation - rather than a mirror - of reality. Each text is written from a specific point of view, with a specific audience in mind, often in pursuit of a specific purpose. Livy is no exception. For all his scrupulousness, he was an ardent republican and saw the writing of history as an essentially moral enterprise, which coloured his presentation of both individual events and of the connections between them. If modern historians are not careful, there is a danger that they might unconsciously allow these same biases to creep into their own work.

Fate and fortune

Needless to say, this is something of which historians are keenly aware. Great effort is devoted to establishing what motivations and preconceptions might have shaped the perspectives of a particular text. This does not mean that we can somehow strip away any biases to reveal a 'clear' view of the past, of course, but it does allow us to adopt a suitably critical stance towards our documents and the connections they suggest. Yet, even if documents are fated to remain mere representations of the past, that is historically significant in itself. As a testament to mentalities rather than objective connections they can still be of great value. Excavating the broader social mindsets underpinning an author's particular bent, however, can be tricky and often requires some sort of theoretical framework, some preconception of how human beings think, feel and relate to one another. And such assumptions - no matter how slight, or well reasoned - are always open to question.

There is also a more fundamental problem with documents. Despite the abundance of material we have, the documentary record is still fragmentary at best, as the fate of Livy illustrates. In many cases, survival is a matter of chance. To take just one example, that the German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf rescued the leaves of the Codex Sinaticus - a fourth-century manuscript of the Greek Bible - from a bin in St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai was nothing more than luck. But survival can also be the result of conscious decisions. Just as readers chosenot to read Livy as much as before and scribes decided not to make additional copies, so archivists choose which documents to preserve or destroy, and political and religious leaders have often banned, or burned, certain books.

As Richard Evans, the former Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, has noted, this makes the practice of historical research rather like 'doing a jigsaw puzzle, where the pieces are scattered all over the house in several boxes, some of which have been destroyed, and where once it is put together, a significant number of the pieces are still missing'. This doesn't mean that we can't do the puzzle, of course. Even if we don't have all the pieces we can still make a reasonable guess at how most of them fit together. But there is still no getting around the fact that so much loss severely limits our ability to connect, or even establish, facts about the past.

Known unknowns

But what about the missing pieces themselves - the pieces of the jigsaw that haven't survived, the material remains that have been burnt, lost or destroyed?

This is arguably where the real fun begins. While historians rightly devote the greater part of their professional lives to filling in the gaps (or at least sidestepping them), the fact that gaps exist at all is significant in itself. As Graham Greene intimated in his short story 'The Destructors', destruction - or even abandonment - can be seen as an attempt at creation. However much of a negation it may be, it serves to shape either the present or the future and is informed (consciously or not) by prevailing assumptions about the world and our relation to it. As such, even the loss of a document - or partof a document - can be revealing.

That scribes stopped copying Livy, while continuing to churn out the Periochae, for example, tells us a great deal about the culture of reading and the growing importance attached to practicality over completeness. What an archivist chooses to discard is informed by underlying beliefs about what future readers might - or should - need; what books a totalitarian government burns are determined by conceptions of 'normalcy', danger and control; and what unpublished works an author destroys is decided by how they perceive their legacy, or the strength of their aesthetic scruples. Even accidents can teach us something about attitudes towards knowledge and conservation.

Yet if the lossof a document - or some other, comparable piece of testimony - is telling, its absenceis even more so. Simply by notbeing there it can take on a life of its own. What reactions that non-existence provokes can themselves be instructive, not only of attitudes towards what has vanished, but also of much wider phenomena.

Rich in loss

Take Livy's Ab urbe condita. After Symmachus commissioned his recension in the early fifth century, no one is known to have read - or even seen - a complete copy of Livy's work. Although some books were still circulating in manuscript form in the German lands 600 years later, the greater part of it had already been lost. When interest in Livy revived in the early 14th century, the consciousness of the loss was acute. Readers, enchanted with his style, were hungry to read more; yet they were frustrated that so little remained. To overcome this, they had to get creative. As Michael Reeve and others have demonstrated, some unknown scholars had in all probability already begun collating the disparate manuscript traditions of several surviving books. But it fell to the Italian humanist Francesco Petrarca - better known in English as Petrarch - to identify a manuscript of the fourth 'decade' (or block of ten books), which had been brought to him by a friend, and to unite it with the first and third for the first time since Antiquity. This version was then passed down to Lorenzo Valla, who used it as the basis for criticising the emendations that Bartolomeo Facio and Antonio Beccadelli had proposed to books 21-26, helping in turn to foster an enthusiastic search for manuscript copies of other books in ecclesiastical libraries throughout Europe. This fuelled the growing interest in the Latin classics and necessitated the development of new techniques of textual criticism, which were later to become pivotal to wider debates about authenticity and historicity. While the loss of much of Livy's Ab urbe condita robs us of a great deal of information about the Roman past, therefore, its absence nevertheless provides us with fascinating insights into the intellectual world of the early Italian Renaissance and beyond.

There are innumerable such missing pieces. Abraham Lincoln's 'lost speech'; Jules Verne's diary; Milena Jesenská's letters to Franz Kafka; the missing books of the Old Testament; the Maya codices destroyed by the conquistadors - the list is endless. Each of these might have been invaluable to the historian. But, simply by notbeing all there, they can tell us quite different - and even more remarkable - stories. It is the hidden history of these missing pieces - or, known unknowns - that this new column will explore in months to come.

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His latest book, Machiavelli: His Life and Times, is now available in paperback.

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What I love most about Livy's Ab urbe condita is that it is not all there. In its day it was monumental, of course. Written in instalments over almost 40 years, it covered the entire period from the legendary foundation of Rome to the death of Drusus in 9 BC.

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Vladimir Kara-Murza (who happens to be an ex-student of Michael Dunn!) considers in the Washington Post why the Soviet-Afghan war is being ‘revised’ by the current Russian government, and viewed in a different light.

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Vladimir Kara-Murza (who happens to be an ex-student of Michael Dunn!) considers in the Washington Post why the Soviet-Afghan war is being ‘revised’ by the current Russian government, and viewed in a different light.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A great example of second order knowledge in history – what does this show us about the fluidity of history, and the way it is subject – more than other areas of knowledge (?) to revision. Students can also compare this article to story 2 and 6 about how history gets re-written, and why. In what ways, and why, is history being rewritten in Russia? Why does history get revised?

KEY TERMS Revisionism, Historical truth, Nullifying facts

LINKS TO History, Politics

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Soviet soldiers fighting in Afghanistan in April 1988. (Estate of Alexander Sekretarev/AP)

It has been said that Russia is a country with an unpredictable past, as every new government tries to rewrite the historical narrative for its political advantage. In this, President Vladimir Putin's regime has been particularly active, launching a wholesale rehabilitation of the Soviet period early on. (One of Putin's first acts in office was restoring the Stalin-era national anthem.)
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Last month, Russian lawmakers took another big step in the same direction by approving a draft resolution that seeks to justify the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. The formal vote on the measure - proposed jointly by lawmakers from the United Russia and Communist parties - will be held before the 30th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops on Feb. 15. Hailing the decision, Communist lawmaker Nikolai Kharitonov called it a victory for "historical truth."

The real historical truth - without quotation marks - was made public with the partial declassification of Soviet archives after 1991. The decision to invade Afghanistan was taken by the Politburo in December 1979; the measure was euphemistically titled "On the situation in 'A.' " The first contingent of the USSR's 40th Army crossed the Amu Darya River into Afghanistan on Dec. 25. Two days later, the Afghan dictator Hafizullah Amin - whose request for assistance served as the pretext for the invasion - was murdered by Soviet special forces in Tajbeg Palace.

The war lasted for nearly a decade. Among its consequences were 1 million civilian casualties; the rise of Islamist fundamentalist groups (backed by the West as a counterweight to the Soviets); and the collapse of the Soviet economy, which precipitated the end of the Soviet Union, which is now so lamented by both Putin and the Communists. The estimated cost in human lives for the Soviet armed forces was 15,000 dead and 54,000 injured.

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Military casualties in Afghanistan were long a forbidden topic in the Soviet Union. At a meeting in July 1981, the Politburo expressly prohibited any commemorations for the Soviet war dead. Funerals for fallen servicemen were held in secret; relatives were forbidden to mark the place of death on the gravestones. (If they disobeyed, local officials removed the inscriptions.) Russian journalist Yevgeni Kiselev, who himself served in Afghanistan as a language instructor, recalls that the war was taboo on Soviet television as late as 1988. As a child going to kindergarten in Moscow during the mid-1980s I remember teachers whispering about the father of one of my classmates serving in Afghanistan.

The state-imposed silence was broken by Russian dissidents, that unique community of people who were prepared to speak the truth even at an immense personal cost. Among them was Andrei Sakharov, the world-renowned nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner who condemned the invasion in the strongest terms. It was, in large measure, for that condemnation that he was confined to the closed city of Gorky between January 1980 and December 1986.

"I am proud of that exile in Gorky, it was an award for me," Sakharov said at the session of the Congress of People's Deputies - the Soviet Union's first semi-freely elected parliament - in June 1989. "The war in Afghanistan was a criminal gamble." In December of that year, the Congress of People's Deputies passed a resolution of "moral and political condemnation" of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was signed by Mikhail Gorbachev, in his capacity as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, on December 24.

It is that statement that Russia's legislature, the Duma, is now preparing to declare null and void. The draft resolution holds that the 1989 condemnation went against "historical justice," and that Soviet military action in Afghanistan was conducted "in full accordance with the norms of international law."

If the Kremlin is serious about "nullifying" the basic facts of 20th-century history, it has great scope for legislative action. The other decisions it may want to revisit include the condemnation of Stalinism at the 1956 Communist Party congress; the condemnation of the World War II-era Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by the same Congress of People's Deputies in 1989; the recognition of the 1940 Soviet takeover of the Baltic States as an annexation, made in the 1991 Russia-Lithuania treaty signed by President Boris Yeltsin and ratified by the Russian parliament; Yeltsin's condemnation of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; and many others.

Such actions will not mean much, though - and not only because the legitimacy of those elected in between 1989 and 1991 was infinitely higher than that of the current rubber-stamp Duma. In December 2000, liberal lawmaker Grigory Yavlinsky was preparing to speak at the Duma session that approved the Soviet national anthem (like other opponents of the decision, he was prevented from taking the floor.) "Russian history will remember those who abolished the symbols of the totalitarian state," he planned to say. "Not those who temporarily restored them."

Perhaps Yavlinsky was wrong, after all. The latter will also be remembered by history - but with nothing more than derision and contempt.

Read more:
Max Boot: The world's tyrants are laughing at Trump - and America Josh Rogin: When Mike Pence met Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping Jackson Diehl: Putin is probably still smirking about Helsinki. He shouldn't be. Kathleen Parker: Everybody wants respect. Especially Vladimir Putin.

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Opinion | Defying history, Moscow moves to defend Soviet war in Afghanistan

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Once again, Russia shows that it is a country with an unpredictable track record.